"Documenting Women's Activism and Leadership in the Chicago Area, 1945-2000" will provide the first comprehensive survey of significant Chicago area personalities, issues, organizations, actions, institutions, legislative initiatives and cultural innovations that contributed to change during this exciting period in the city's history. CAWHC will serve as a central registry for information about resources and as a catalyst for projects undertaken by the community. For more

- Conduct oral history interviews with significant movement personalities and those influenced by it

We Need Your Help!

The project embraces women's activism and feminism in all of its diversity and contradictions including advocates of equal rights, equal opportunity, women's liberation, social, radical, lesbian and liberal feminism, and it will take a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-racial approach to movement issues. It will also consider the work of women artists, theologians, and other cultural leaders who created a revolution in many areas of American life.

As a result we need your help identifying resources and gathering information. If you have materials to share, please fill out and submit one of the forms listed below.

- If you participated in women's movements fpr change and have experiences, information, contacts and/or archival materials that you would like to share please fill out and submit this form.

- If you are an archivist and have relevant resources in your repository, please fill out and

The Chicago Area Women’s History Council is non-profit, volunteer organization founded in 1971 to support women’s history in the Chicago area. We are a dynamic network of historians, archivists, teachers, public historians, media professionals, writers, artists, activists, and scholars from many disciplines.

is identifing and preserving resources to document women’s contributions during this period, with

a particular emphasis on the Chicago women’s movement of the 1960s - 1980s. This grassroots

effort brings together scholars, archivists, activists and community leaders to uncover hidden material that will be used to update the research we undertook in producing Women Building Chicago, A Biographical Dictionary, 1970-1990.

Contact Us

We'd love to hear from you! Let us know if you have questions or information to share. For membership information follow the link above.